In article <6EtmA-4vt-3@gated-at.bofh.it>, Leonid Grinberg wrote:
> The machine has both a floppy drive and a CD drive, but the BIOS does
> not recognize the CD drive as a drive, and does not allow me to boot
> off of it, let alone USB. That leaves only floppies.
> the machine is unable to
> recognize the ethernet card, and I can't get much further than that
>
> The machine already runs some old distro of Linux,
> Any ideas?
Save yourself a big hassle. Move the hard drive to a newer machine and
do the base install there. Then edit etc/fstab as needed and move it back.
Make a "raw" GRUB floppy with the new machine. Use it to boot the
old one the first time, then install syslinux or grub or lilo
or whatever in place. That should get you around any broken BIOS.
I do laptop installs that way.
That's *much* easier than
fiddling around with Debian install floppies and non-booting CDs
and unsupported Ethernet cards.
If the newer machine has a Debian system on it already,
and it fits on the old drive,
you don't even need to go through the base install.
Just make a file system on the old drive.
You can cp -a a Debian system from one drive to another.
(Remember not to copy /proc/ and /tmp/, and clean out
/var/cache/apt/archives first.)
Then edit etc/fstab, boot the copy with your raw GRUB
floppy, and uninstall everything you don't need.
While you're at it, the newer machine is faster, so make a kernel
for the old machine there.
Cameron